HIPPOLYTE STUDIO
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi/studio

Timo Wright
OUR MEMORIES ARE TOMORROW
12.9.-5.10.2008
Open: Tue-Fri 12-17, Sat-Sun 12-16

Our Memories Are Tomorrow is a computer-based exhibition of photographs and an installation about memories and wavering and fragility of the memories. We have started to save our memories - text messages, photographs, e-mails, blogs - electrically. Digital information lasts forever, but in fact it is hard to maintain and store it. File types change, hard disks break, programs get old.

It is presumable that a major part of our everyday memories will be destroyed in an irreparable way.

It is us, the producers of the digital memories, who take a risk in preservation of our memories. The exhibition Our Memories Are Tomorrow deals with this risk in a concrete and critical way and arouses discussion about the preservation of our memories. It doesn't criticize our memories, it doesn't measure the value of our memories. It doesn't care about something being art and something being worthless trash. It destroys everything, without criticizing, without judging, breaking the connection with our memories, with our history.

It also questions the necessity of memory X artefacts; is it necessary to have a physical counterpart and a fixing point to preserve and recall the memories. For ordinary people photograph's meaning is in its ability to save the memories. The memories are anyhow immaterial and can be saved only as such. On the other hand the principles of the digital preservation of the memories are the same as those of the preservation of other immaterial memories: also our own memories crumple, it is hard to retrieve them, their meaning changes.

The exhibition consists of the photographer Timo Wright's photograph series Long Sunday, Everybody that I love will die and Berlin, day one. These documentary photograph series are about becoming adult - the last days of adolescence. Wright has photographed his own life as well as the lives of his friends for the last eight years. The exhibition consists of computers handling and finally destroying a photograph archives of thousands of pictures. At the end of the exhibition there will be no pictures left.

Andreas Schmelas, a student at the Universitet der Kunst/Berlin, has designed computer programming.
The photographs and the exhibition concept are produced by the photographer Timo Wright.
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Timo Wright (s.1977):
What makes us alike, what makes us different? What do we carry with us, what do we leave for others to carry? I photograph the ordinary and the extraordinary. My background is in documentary films, only the truth and truth-like things interest me. The themes in my earlier production focus on becoming adult and on the last days of adolescence. I have dealt with these sentiments for example in the series such as "Long Sunday" and "Helsinki, 1room + kitchenette". My present artistic themes are about memories and the necessity of giving up, which I deal with in the installations "Everybody that I love will die" and "Our Memories Are Tomorrow" .

For more information, please contact:
Petronella Grönroos, exhibition co-ordinator / Photgraphic Gallery Hippolyte +358 9-612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi